Sarah Haig

Author Archives

Silverside just submitted 25 pages of representations and certifications to the DARPA contracting officer. Among the statements in these “reps and certs” that we authenticated: we do not subcontract with firms owned by the government of a terrorist country, and no founder is delinquent in paying federal taxes. Good. We can sign off on that. […]

Silverside met U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker last week, participating in a tour and roundtable discussion on manufacturing and innovation hosted by Greentown Labs. The Secretary has made the support of start-ups a platform of her policy agenda, and she is moving beyond rhetoric and into the gritty details of practice: she and her staff […]

I’ve been captivated by the news of “Operation Onymous,” the joint sting operation by the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and Europol that took down dozens of “dark net” websites that transacted in drugs, child pornography, and killers-for-hire. I have a fundamental appreciation for the Tor Project; even though this secure network of servers allows […]

I dropped my water bottle in the office yesterday, spilling water on the floor. The kitchen was stocked with two types of paper towels: expensive super high absorbent name-brand rolls, and generic, thinner wipes. Taking one of the higher absorbent rolls did the trick, but so did two of the thinner ones. And the thinner […]

The good news about nuclear bombs is that only two elements can be used induce a nuclear explosion: plutonium (Pu) and highly enriched uranium (HEU). While securing and detecting these materials is a herculean task, at least the field of materials is narrowed. First, a refresher crash course in chemistry: An element is a substance […]

This is the first post in a series that reviews the basic science, trade-offs, and policy issues around nuclear threat detection. Nuclear bombs, dirty bombs, radiological dispersion…there are a lot of threats out there, and they are not all equal. When governments assess terror risks to their citizens in part based on the potential scale […]

Multiple terrorist organizations are known to be seeking a nuclear weapon, thus establishing the imperative of securing all weapons-grade nuclear materials around the globe. What’s the status of nuclear material security? It’s a mixed bag, according to Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) , a D.C.-based think-tank that has just released the 2014 Nuclear Materials Security Index. While […]